No Alaska oil has been exported since 2004, and little if any since 2000, according to the Energy Information Administration and the Congressional Research Service.

And Congress has never imposed outright bans on oil exports. Congress prohibited exports of Alaska oil in 1973 when the Alaska oil pipeline was built. But that ban was lifted in 1996 when there were large volumes of Alaska oil coming down from the North Slope and U.S. demand was soft.

(b) Reimposition of Prohibition on Crude Oil Exports- Upon the effective date of this Act, subsection (d) of section 7 of the Export Administration Act of 1979 (50 U.S.C. App. 2406(d)), shall be effective, and any other provision of that Act (including sections 11 and 12) shall be effective to the extent necessary to carry out such section 7(d), notwithstanding section 20 of that Act or any other provision of law that would otherwise allow exports of oil to which such section 7(d) applies.

But Rick, nothing in her past gives any hint that she knows what she’s talking about on any subject. And when people do have the opportunity to probe further behind her soundbites, what emerges is a stream of nonsense. She’s under-educated and she has little managerial experience in any job, other than politics. Contrast that to Obama, he obtained a law degree, practiced law and lectured in law, with moderate to enthusiastic acclaim. What Obama did, prior to politics, is hard to do, and requires a huge degree of self-control, intellectual rigour, unshirked responsibility, and constant questioning.

When someone claims to be an “energy expert”, everyone ought to think that they either have a phD to back up that claim, have published on the subject, or have extensive practical experience (and often all three). Palin has neither. That a lie like having expertise in energy escapes her lips so easily should make one wonder about her intellectual fitness for office. That she even claims to know something to a level of expertise in any subject, other than being a “hockey mom”, is proof she shouldn’t have ever thought herself capable of fulfilling a job with huge responsibilities, and is a clear warning to those that might be inclined to support her.

The fact that so few Republicans question her candidacy make me think that the party has become so corrupt that anyone questioning the orthodoxy is actively threatened, or there is now a sickening soviet level of self-censorship within the party.

Picking a vice-presidential candidate is not the hardest thing a party has to do, and yet when the process they set in motion comes up with Sarah Palin, it ought to be clear to anyone that the Republicans are now so bereft of people of intelligence, or that those of intelligence that remain are so cowed by the anti-intellectual wing of the party, that the party will be incabable of setting up the very complicated processes now necessary just to come up with policies to answer America’s toughest problems.

Palin’s managerial experience. Remember that when she took over the mayor’s chair in that town of less than 6,000 the town hired a full time city administrator to do the actual day-to-day administration. Palin wasn’t running the office, supervising people, making the decisions, and learning on the job.

Take a look at her record governing Alaska. She’s cut from the George Bush bolt of cloth. At home and not on the job an inordinate amount of time. She’s left someone else in the capitol doing the work that she was hired to do.

And, remember, she has no educational background in management, finance, or any other field that would give her the intellectual tools to make her a competent executive. Neither does she have an educational background to understand how governments work, how the legal system works, how the world functions.